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In the pale dining room, almost grey and almost purple, where her mother had loved to feed people for fifty years, Rhonda Jones stood staring at a clutter of plates and teacups. The room smelled like old wood and maybe just a little like mouse. Her mother would have been horrified that it didn’t still smell of Pledge and Lysol.

“All these dishes,” Rhonda said.

The box she’d brought in from the car would not be big enough. Some of the dinner sets weren’t too bad; there was one with a band of light aqua blue that would probably go home with her.

“I guess I’ll take most of this to Good Will.”

It was odd to hear her own voice breaking the dead silence of the house. She closed her mouth firmly, set aside her purse, and shook herself out of her coat. It was tight on the arms. She’d been building muscle at the gym recently.

If it hadn’t been for keeping fit and working hard, this winter would have been unbearable. The election the year before had set her teeth on edge, made her break with a few friends on Facebook, and gotten her to read too many feminist dystopian novels.

In this state of anxiety, her mother had finally succumbed to her cancer, passing away last summer in the middle of a heat wave. The grass had browned all over town, except for where people snuck out at night to water their lawns even though it was against the ordinance.

Rhonda knew the ordinance well because she had helped draft it. People liked to think no one who worked for the city really did anything, but they’d be mad as hell if everyone got to green up their lawn and then nothing came out when they went to turn on the shower one day. There had been some lunchtime jokes at city hall about all the toilets that couldn’t be flushed.

“They’ll get over it,” Rhonda had said. She tapped a button on her keyboard and the email was sent. Her employee would shoot it along the proper channels and the town would know about it by the next morning.

Still, some people felt entitled to look out for themselves, turning on their garden hoses real quiet, padding around their own driveway with the sprayer in hand, their slippers getting wet, head spinning as they peered into the dark around them like thieves.

It was August when her mother finally wilted and left. How she kept herself together during the funeral with all the family around to drive her nuts, Rhonda would never know. Her cousins would say with Jesus’ love and mercy and Rhonda would nod in agreement, although she’d stopped believing years before. That was an unwinnable debate. Saying you didn’t believe in Jesus in the Jones family was tantamount to trash talking somebody’s grandmother.

Rhonda considered herself good at choosing her battles. She saw peace and calm as the most cherished state of mind and organized everything in her life to protect it. How calmly she had decided to get out of her marriage. How still she’d been as they sat next to one another at a lawyer’s desk, her signature a brisk scratch, his a slow and mournful note.

After the funeral, her cousins lost interest in comforting her quickly.

“She doesn’t want that from us,” Charline had said. She was the leader of their small tribe, the oldest and the biggest, with shoulders and arms that strained to burst from under the triple layers of bra, floral sundress, and ecru cardigan.

Rhonda always looked on at her cousins in amazement. The ring of seven that were the backbone of Mt. Hebron Baptist Church. They dressed liked their mothers did for church. None of them were over fifty-five yet, but they might have been born the same year as women who were pushing eighty. She knew it was a tradition and something that made them feel connected to the comforts of lost mothers and fathers. She also knew that it was the proper ceremonial garb for the new queens of the church.

Still, to Rhonda, who always wore the same simple navy dress when at last her excuses ran out and she had to make an appearance in the aisles, the others looked like children playing dress up. Truth be told, they tired her.

Church tired her and so did tradition.

Yet still she was guarding herself against upsets, against drama, like if anything normal were to blow up, she knew she’d take the shrapnel in the gut. Maybe that explained why she always passed a hand protectively in front of her stomach whenever the cousins approached her.

“You’re your own worst enemy,” Charline said to her one Sunday last winter. “You don’t have to do it all alone. Besides, you don’t have time to clean that place out and Aunt Edith would be so sad to see her house go to rack and ruin.”

She wanted to say that it was only getting a little dusty, that she kept gas in the tank and the heat set just low enough so no pipes would freeze. She should have said that she paid a man to keep the lawn mowed and that she popped in once a week to double check the window locks and to wave the flashlight around in the basement in case the old water heater started to leak again. It had that once but it had been fixed.

Instead she said, “Thank you, Charline. I’ll think about it.”

Today she had planned to finally start going through the things, taking the house apart. She had pulled her car all the way up the drive, into the shadows of the wisteria arbor, just in case one of the queens drove by and saw her there. She didn’t want their help, their soft flower perfume and soft flower dresses, their forceful voices, the cluck and close by thunder of their laughter – they laughed exactly alike to a one – and their knowing confidence about how to best wrap up dishes and put away tablecloths so they wouldn’t yellow.

Maybe she didn’t want them to know how much she wasn’t going to keep. If they saw how disposable the past was to her, they’d probably start to figure out why she was the most apt to miss church. Why she never stayed too long at reunion picnics. Through a series of self discoveries, Rhonda had become unlike the tribe. And knowing the views of the tribe, she had unhitched herself from them in ways that were always just beneath the surface.

So now to wrapping the dishes in sheets of newspaper, to having the tips of her fingers blacken from stories about wars in other places and games won here at home. She knew this was going to take a while. Pulling a few containers of Chinese food she’d picked up to eat later from the box, she went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.

It was humid, tepid, and empty. She had forgot that she’d unplugged it months ago, when she cleared everything in it into a big trash bag and took it to the land fill. Pickle jar, mayonnaise jar. Ketchup. Mustard. Capers. So many kinds of jelly. Her mother loved toast and jelly.

It was too much, all the sudden, keeping guard against all the things inside of her that would disrupt her peace and quiet. There was rage inside of her and there was pain. Rhonda could almost see the former like white light racing out of a tunnel, and she could nearly smell the other. Old hurts that stank like sour milk and regrets that all blended together to make a drab and familiar odor like a spice cabinet.

Cumin for the time she didn’t come home from college to help her mother make barbecue. She’d shown up the day of instead, driving straight to the park, and letting some of the boy cousins get the food out of her mother’s car. She’d been talking to a friend she brought from school.

Clove for that winter night years ago when she headed over for chili and, seeing the light on behind the lace curtains, was unable to make herself pull into the drive for a visit. She called over later and said she wasn’t feeling well. Her mother had sounded so disappointed.

Cinnamon for when her mother nursed her through the flu as a child and all she could keep down was little torn pieces of toast. Her mother told her she would have put a little more butter on it, but she wasn’t sure if it was too rich. In a sick room that she had been in for a few days by then, the sugary warm smell of the cinnamon toast might have brought on her nausea but it didn’t. She was probably already getting better, but it seemed like her mother had made magic happen.

Celery salt and cardamon for the legendary potato salad her mother taught her to make a month before she died and which Rhonda had never made sense because she didn’t want too much starch in her diet. The recipe, written carefully on a notecard, kept surfacing in her purse like something thrown in the sea that insists on coming back to shore. That spidery hand of her mothers. No one wrote like that anymore.

It was so close to the surface, her grief, that she felt it would push out through her eyes and ears. Her heart had started to race. She should sit down and try to breath the way her therapist had taught her. This time she knew it wouldn’t work.

If Charline were there, she’d pull her into her arms and cradle her like a child.

Charline would say, “You have to go through it, Rhonda. There’s no other way.”

Rhonda paced in circles, as if she were escaping the clutch of something, and then she stopped because she felt a little dizzy and like her heart was going to abruptly cease beating. She had to get out of the house, she thought, and her hands trembled as she unlocked the kitchen door and stepped out onto the back porch.

It had started to rain.

It drew her out from under shelter, it brought her to the center of the lawn, not far from the clothes line where her mother used to walk up and down with fistfuls of fabric and pins, her face hidden by a wide straw hat. She’d always seemed a little turned away from Rhonda, bent over her work, and except for when she absolutely needed her mother, Rhonda had always stayed a little back, watching her movements with a hungry urgency and a mouth set in a straight, mute line.

She ran her fingers along the clothesline, trailing it up to the post and turning and walking it again to where the line ended in another post that had been overtaken by lilacs. Her wet shirt clung to her coldly, her hair dropped beads of water into her open mouth. The tears were close now, and she simply needed to wait for them. The time had finally come and whether or not she could survive the pain was not even a thought her mind could form. She was rendered animal for the moment, all wide eyes and gathered shoulders, moving up and down the clothesline while the rain fulfilled a promise to the grass under her feet.

Sometimes my kava tea smells like a car ride home from the Christmas pageant at my church when I was a kid. And my Burt’s Bees face wash smells like that, too. There is something a bit citric and slightly sweet about these fragrances – and like the mild, flattened out melange of an old spice drawer – that reminds me of the one clementine and the plastic sandwich bag of rock candy given out to each kid as we left. That aroma filled the car, the clementine rolling around on the seat, unloved, while I grappled to loosen a piece of candy from the lump that had stuck together. The hard candy was disappointing to me, a fat kid who preferred all treat roads to arrive at chocolate town, but I would take sugar however it came to me.

The hippy-adjacent rituals of my cruelty-free cleanser and natural relaxation tea seem themselves worlds separate from a white bread family driving home from a baptist church in a Ford station wagon in the 1980s. To be fair, while world peace and zero carbon foot print were not buzz words in our family, we were hardly model conservatives either.

The last thing on my mind was God and I suspect it wasn’t on the minds of my family, either, because talk centered around whose kid forgot their lines – with a lot of laughter and a healthy dollop of schadenfreude – and then, more quietly, there were gossipy exchanges between our parents about other adults. Eventually we broke the barrier between front seat and back by sharing the tidbits of ignorance we’d gleaned from other kids before the show.

This wasn’t the first time my parents had to hear kid gossip and go to the bat to save the world from our brutality and flagrance. My mom always either cried out in alarm or rolled her tongue in disgust at our childish ignorance. She would caution us against gossip in general and then run defense for the rest of the community. This night was like most others.

“Barry Hart is not that way. He just happens to be a nice, polite kid, who cares about his appearance. I wish more kids were like Barry. And don’t forget how hurtful it would be if talk like that got back to his mother. Eloise has it hard enough, raising that boy alone.”

And, “Tammy Jo is a perfectly pretty girl. I don’t know why the moment someone puts on a couple of pounds, everyone becomes obsessed with how big she’s going to get. People are so stupid sometimes!”

That one felt personal. We weren’t blind to the fact that there was a little more lap to mom these days than there used to be. Come to think of it, cuddling up with a pudgy mom when we were really little felt great, so it is strange that society gets so distraught about it. Maybe if we were all to get swept up in this hygge craze, we’d each discover the comforts of a vast and pillowy hug and finally set the fashion world aflame. Okay, now I’m taking it personally, because I, too, have a bit more lap these days. I wish people would leave Tammy Jo Clatterbuck the fuck alone!

Of course, the tidbit of pre-pageant gossip that had come up before and which my mother took pretty seriously was the one about Sven Jenkins. It had been bantered around by kids for as long as I could remember. This ride home from the pageant it was my middle sister who reopened the cold case, lisping in my memory because she was either in between teeth or worrying a chunk of candy.

“Donna said Sven Jenkins is a child molester. Is that true, Mom?”

“It’s Mr. Jenkins, Meredith. And, no, I don’t think he’s a child molester. Do you kids even know what that means?”

We bristled.

“It’s when grownups do stuff to kids and stuff!” That was my oldest sister, Molly, her voice a mixture of boredom and winter allergies from the wood stove at home. Nasal and flat, she usually chimed in from behind a trashy romance novel. Tonight she was pretending to study the pageant program in the dark.

“I watch 20/20, Mom!” That was me, wanting it to be clear that I had a level of worldliness far beyond my years. In fact, though I really was foggy about what child molesters were, I knew a lot about normal, everyday sex from reading Molly’s trashy romance novels.

I’m still surprised that a sixteen year old girl was allowed to read that openly in our house and that a nine year old boy could get by with it with little effort to hide his movements. My sexual awakening was painted all the more colorfully by reading accounts of men with tanned and brawny thighs ravishing women on the beaches of Caribbean plantations or in the wet grasses of an English moor. Thanks, Kathleen E. Woodiwiss, for all the deliciously filthy memories.

Regarding pedophiles in our baptist church, Meredith brought forth evidence from the court of public opinion.

“They say he lures kids to him with those pink mints.”

He did give each kid a round pink mint from the pocket of his nice navy blazer with the brass buttons each Sunday after church. A tall and lean farmer with a speckled tan and a blond flattop haircut that always looked newly cut, he had to lean down pretty far to offer the sweets. It did feel a little alarming when he’d peer at you and hold out the circle of pink cradled in his palm.

“Oh my God,” Mom said. And that was as close to God as that car ride home from the Christmas pageant ever got. “Can’t a man give kids candy anymore without being accused of something? People are so…sick.”

I don’t remember how that conversation ended. I like to think we eventually grew quiet, tired of trying on adult themes, letting our heads lean together as we succumbed to a sugar coma. Maybe I even eventually tore away the skin of that clementine.

She ruined his birthday cake. It burned in the oven while she sat out on the fire escape, smoking one cigarette after another, trembling because the Spring was cold and late that year in Chicago. Berniece hadn’t felt the cold much, hadn’t gotten her sweater from the back of the chair in the bedroom, though her hand, arched over her knee, trembled so that long columns of ash would fall on her stocking feet and brake into flakes like dirty snowballs.

Luckily the fire alarm grabbed her from her revery before the whole place burned up. She didn’t like to think what Robert would have said if he came home to a crowd gathered outside the building and a firetruck parked on the street. It took her hours to get the scorch marks off the front of the stove, vent the smoke out of the apartment, and tidy the kitchen back up. She called down to the baker and asked him to make a birthday cake, white with chocolate icing. When he asked her how embellished she wanted it, she got nervous and said she wanted it plain, just like a normal cake.

“You don’t want me to put ‘Happy Birthday, Tommy’ on it?”

“Tommy,” she repeated.

“Yeah.”

A silence stretched thinly between them. Over the phone she could hear the baker breathing and the sound of an oven door whining open and clattering closed. Finally he said, “How about candles? What’s that now, nine? Ten? You got those, Mrs. Allen?”

“I have those. Can you have it done by four o’clock?”

“Four o’clock?”

“I know it’s short notice…” Then she came clean all in a rush, and they were both surprised that she was crying as she said she ruined her son’s cake. It wasn’t something for a person to cry about. The baker said that.

“Don’t cry over a birthday cake, Mrs. Allen.” He said, “I’ll rearrange a couple of things and get your cake done by three. If you want to bring me down your own plate, I’ll put it on that before I put in the icing.”

She was laughing through her tears now. “Oh, thank you. Yes, I’ll be down.”

It was too much to try to pull herself together. It was almost one and Tommy would be home just after three and Robert by six. She threw on a long coat and shoved her feet into a pair of taupe kitten heels that she wore too often because they made her feel instantly pulled together. As her toes sank into the mouth of the shoes, she saw the ash stains being covered over, herself cheaply transformed into a normal wife and mother.

Lipstick. A scarf and – at the last minute – earrings. She rubbed lotion into her hands and found clean gloves. Berniece didn’t give the apartment a last glance as she stepped out with her purse in one hand and the plate in a brown paper bag under the other arm. She never glanced back when she left.

Act 2: The Visitation

It felt like a dream the moment she opened her eyes. She was standing in the hallway of an office building. At one end of the hallway there were two windows, ganged together, with oak blinds pulled but tilted open. A fiery sunset with a round clementine sun was painted over the shadowy buildings. She was alone in the hallways except for a pair of wilted trees in pots that guarded the elevators.

It was an older building, completely foreign to her, though the type was ubiquitous. Oak trims and doors with textured glass in the top panel. Plain block lettering in black on the glass. Later she would only recall one of the names. Knee high columns of metal and faux wood with sand in the tops for putting out cigarettes. Miles of speckled taupe linoleum tile that made her kitten heels seem to disappear when she glanced at her feet.

How had she come to be here?

She crossed to the elevator and tapped the down button, but the light didn’t come on and there was no sound as she waited of a line igniting, the lift rising or dropping from other floors. She tapped it three times more.

“You’re on the right floor.”

She turned to see a man silhouetted against an office doorway. He was tall and broad, made to look like a tank in his boxy suit. A highlight along his face revealed blond whiskers and surprisingly small ears.

“No, I’m not supposed to be here. I’m not sure how I got here.”

“I need to speak to you, Mrs. Allen.”

“How do you know-”

“We haven’t time for that now. Come into my office.”

He turned away and she followed him, despite herself, like a moth compelled by a porch light. Although she anticipated no ecstasy. In fact, she moment she passed over the threshold into his office, she wasn’t surprised to see the lighting change, the colors growing dimmer. Why was she not surprised?

It was like they both knew something, yet she’d forgotten.

“You’re missing,” he said without preamble. “And I need your help to find you.” Leaning against his desk with one ankle crossed over the other and his arms folded together at the waist, he was closed off except for his clear brown eyes, studying her intently.

She recognized him then.

“You’re that detective that Robert hired last year when Sheldon asked him to go into business with him and Robert was worried. You found all those lawsuits, the shell corporation. Robert was so pleased with your work.”

Suddenly she felt like a normal wife again, like when she put on red lipstick or washed the smoke off her hands. This was what wives did, making men who did business with their husbands feel valuable. Her mother had always been good at just that; she could make a dinner party far better than their small kitchen should have allowed. And she kept the wine flowing and later the cigars and brandy. The men all insisted she stay when she demurred and insisted on leaving them to their own vices. Berniece’s family never had parties with wives – or it didn’t seem like that in her memories – only men, lining the tables, wearing fat ties, crimp marks in their hair where their hat brims had rested too many hours of the day, beating the streets to sell things to women who stood in doorways, trying to loosen their apron strings, glancing back over their shoulders now and again in to deep and shadowed front halls.

“We ain’t got money for nothing.”

Berniece could never make a dinner party come off. Robert preferred to meet his colleagues at restaurants. He said neutral territory was better. It was more modern. She was pretty sure it was on account of her peculiarities. That’s the word Robert liked to use, his eyes slipping away from her gaze, a kindness that smarted like a paper cut.

The man leaning on his desk shook his head.

“He said you drifted away like this all the time.”

“He said? Who said?”

Now she was back in the office with the detective.

“Oh,” she said.

The detective crossed toward her and beckoned her to take a seat.

“We need to talk about Friday.”

“Today is Friday.”

“No, ma’am. Today is Monday. And no one’s seen you for three days.”

She squinted into the colorless corners of his office.

“That can’t be true. I’m right here. I just left the apartment to go to the-” She broke off, glancing down at her hands. Only the purse, still clutched in her right glove.

“Oh, good. I must have dropped off the plate.”

“Yes, you did. The baker confirmed it. That was at a quarter passed one on Friday. Then someone remembered seeing you crossing through the park. The one near your apartment house.”

She remembered that as soon as he said it.

“Yes, that’s right. I went to the park. I cut across it diagonally so I could walk past the fountain. The old one, not the new one. I like the old one better.”

“Did you meet anyone there.”

“Of course not.”

She opened her purse to find her cigarettes, but her hand fished around only in emptiness, the glove whispering against the stained red satin lining.

“Oh, my. I must have been robbed.” She held the purse out to him.

“Anyone suspicious follow you?”

She stood, leaving the purse on the chair like a mouth hanging open, and she began to pace the floor. “There was a man. We passed one another just as I stepped into the park. He glanced at me and he held my gaze for just a moment too long. You understand? It made me feel uncomfortable. Undressed. I walked a little faster then. And I wanted to look back to make sure he was still heading away.”

Berniece paused and looked into the detective’s eyes.

“But then I was scared that if I turned back, we’d make eye contact again and he’d be encouraged. So I cut through a little path that wends its way through boxwoods and hollies.”

“Did he follow you?”

She frowned. “I don’t remember.”

“What did he look like?”

“He was thin. He wore a grey suit, a little shiny at the elbows, like a man who’s down on his luck. A square sort of face. Pale grey eyes or maybe that was just the light glinting off his spectacles. I’m not sure about that.”

“Did he smile? Did he seem friendly or threatening?”

She shivered, recalling. “He seemed hungry.”

He crossed to her and placed his hands on her shoulders. He became her father then in a sense, with a troubled and kind expression, holding her before him to ask more questions. Only when her father did it, she could smell his floral pomade, his cigars, and his aftershave, something like spices and woodsmoke. It had always been too much to take in, especially when meeting his eye was already so tumultuous.

The detective said, “This is important, Mrs. Allen. Did you see him again?”

She nodded, wanting to shrug his hands away. Instead she stepped back and he lifted his arms before his fingers would have slipped down over her breasts. Taking up her purse and resuming her seat, she stared into the corners of the room again.

“I did see him again. But it wasn’t in the park. It was in a room. He was standing above me with a window at his back. And his shirt was stained then. And his hands, too.”

She frowned, her lips feeling a little thick as she spoke the words, “Blood, I think.” Funny that it didn’t frighten her in the least.

“Outside the window over his shoulder there was a water tower in the distance. It said Trubin City. That’s about twenty minutes north of here. A horrible little town. Robert and I got stuck there once, years ago, waiting for a mechanic to patch our tire.”

“I know of it.”

“Well, I can tell you one thing. There aren’t many Victorian houses in Trubin City. Mostly little places with pointed roofs like they were building back in the twenties. And newer ones, tiny brick boxes with flat roofs. And lots of long, low-slung cinder block shops with plate glass fronts. Dime stores with things that make everything seem just a little meaner. Like plastic flowers you put on graves.”

She dug around in her purse again, wanting to smoke and forgetting.

“I was going to study architecture. I used to want…”

Shrugging, she glanced at the detective.

He was thrusting his arms into his trench coat.

“There isn’t much time,” he said. “I’m off to Trubin City.”

She should have stood and followed him to the elevators. Instead she sat there and stared at the things on his desk. Bills and memoranda all with cluttered black ink that said nothing she recognized. An ashtray overflowing and a coffee mug that probably hadn’t been washed since Eisenhower was president. Behind her she heard the bell for the elevator and the whoosh of the doors opening. Then it closed again and she could hear the motor as the car dropped away and away.

Act 3: Revelation

When she opened her eyes again, Berniece knew at once that it was not a dream. It felt nothing like it. There was nothing surreal about the hospital room: the muddy green blue paint on the bottom half of the walls, the crimped metal blinds at the square windows, the band around her wrist with words she understood plainly.

The detective was there, but this was not like before.

In noon sunlight as pale as a white onion, he sat in the visitor chair, his head slumped forward, his whispers shimmering like gold dust. He started awake, rubbed his eyes, looked into her face as if he were meeting her eye for the first time.

“You’re awake,” he said. “I should call the nurse.”

“No, don’t,” she said. She wanted to ask him if he remembered their last meeting. Instead she waited to hear what he had to say.

“How are you feeling?” A familiar question, she’d heard a lot in her life, always with a note of hesitation, the asker braced for disappointment.

It seemed pointless to argue. Even she had felt it was a dream, all the while.

“So he poisoned me?”

He leaned back and folded his hands on his lap carefully.

“The way he tells it, after you stabbed him, you took the pills yourself.”

“I stabbed him? But that’s nonsense.”

“He says you went berserk and stabbed him over and over with a steak knife that got brought up with the dinner tray. He’s got the wounds and we’ve got the knife. That much checks out.”

After a silence, he added, “He said you tapped him on the shoulder in the park, asked him if he wanted to go for a ride. To get out of the city. He said he thought you were some sort of crazy rich lady out looking for a lark.”

She thought about the loose springs in the sofa. “My husband wishes we were rich, but we’re always missing the boat.”

“He said you wound up in Trubin City at that bed and breakfast Friday night. You spent the next two days racking up a bill for wine and steaks. You sent him out to buy liquor Saturday night before the store closed and the two of you spent most of the weekend in bed together.”

She brought her hands out from under the sheet, wanting to hold them together because she felt cold. Her nail polish was chipped and there were scratches on the backs of her hands. Her wedding ring was still there, and the engagement ring with its little shaving of diamond.

“I don’t understand. I’m a mother. I’m not a monster.”

He leveled his eyes on her face and he didn’t seem to have anything to say just yet.

“I pass this man in the park and then I wake up here and you tell me I tried to kill him.”

“And then yourself.”

She felt the muscles around her mouth twist as she thought of protesting. Then her features went flat again. It felt true, the things he was telling her, although she still couldn’t remember. A cloud must have passed over the sun because the room grew darker.

“I don’t know what to say. I have to believe it’s true, although I can’t imagine why I’d do it. I never do anything to make a fuss. I never fight. I never kick or scream. I’m as meek as a mouse. I always try to be good. I never get things right. I never have.”

“Mrs. Allen?”

“The cake,” she said, scratching blood out of her cuticles with her thumb. “I wanted to make it myself.”

Then, thrusting her hands back under the sheets again, she asked, “Is it still Monday?”

“Tuesday.”

“That’s Tommy’s real birthday. But we always have birthdays on Saturdays. It’s so much easier, isn’t it?”

For show and tell, Sunny demonstrated how to make tea the Japanese way. With long blond hair and a tomboy’s beauty and poise, she stood at the teacher’s desk, heating the water, an electric cord trailing to the single steel-plated plug under the blackboard. There were a few workarounds to bring the tea to an American classroom and I doubt that now a twelve year old would be allowed to heat water over a glowing red burner in front of their schoolmates.

I remember only a few technical things about the demonstration. Sunny measured loose leaves into what I believe was a chamber that stacked overtop of the pot, perhaps with small holes that allowed the water to steep with the leaves before descending to the lower vessel. That part is vague. What stood out is that she said the proper way to prepare tea was to use the water when it was not quite boiling. The temperature was important to open up the leaves.

The teacher nodded knowingly.

It’s funny to me that I can remember this so clearly, the tea demonstration, the light on Sunny’s hair, the brief introduction that let us know Sunny’s father had served overseas and that they had only recently returned to America. She had a posture that was almost athletic, a confident way of holding her head, a smile that was broad and free. Her jeans were light blue with curves of stitching on the pockets.

The room filled up with the scent of tea, exotic to me because the only hot drink I ever smelled at home was the Eight O’Clock coffee that cooked itself thick every morning in the percolator. The same batch that Dad made at four-thirty before leaving for work, mom would finish off at seven after she’d dragged us out of bed. No wonder she was seduced by cans of International Coffees only a few short years later.

I want to imagine that it was spring when Sunny made tea, that a tree was in bloom outside the metal-cased windows, covered in pink blooms that imitated cherry blossoms. But this is my adult mind embroidering the story with a designer’s inclination for well-defined motifs.

It was autumn, though, and in a few months the shuttle Challenger would explode on a television set in our science class. We would go home that day on a bus quietly full of hushed whispers shielded behind dirty mittens. But on the day that Sunny made tea, we were ahead of a tragedy; no snow had yet fallen and the leaves were only just turning. The school year was new and so were Sunny and I to this school.

I think of Sunny and her tea demonstration at least a handful of times a year and I cannot imagine why. It has been thirty years since that pot of tea cooled and the leaves made their way into the waste basket. I’ve only just tried to imagine the details I wouldn’t have seen, like Sunny and her mom washing up the teapot together at a kitchen sink that evening. Her father might have sat at the table nearby, his military shoulders set square and mighty as he glanced up over the paper to ask how the demonstration went.

I can imagine that most of us watching her from our desks could have been sketched as round cartoon faces with slack oval mouths, diagonal lines to show our brows raised in wonderment. I think I remember that some of the girls came up to Sunny afterward, more than convinced that she ought to be ushered into their group.

Later Jamie White stood beside her at recess, talking to her comfortably as they each dug their hands into their back pockets, bookends clearly well suited to one another. Jamie could hold onto the flagpole with both hands and hold his body straight out like he was being blown away in a gale force wind. The pair of terrycloth athletic wrist bands he always wore didn’t help him with this trick, but they made him seem a little more badass. The only time I ever saw him look less than completely confident is when Sunny smiled at him and his face went red behind the little corn chip moles on his cheeks. He dropped his eyes to the cracked concrete, grinning so wide it looked like it hurt.

I knew a man once who was cruel, but his story was also cruel. The memory of how his life unfolded still haunts me.

It began when he saved the life of a wizard. Remarkable in and of itself. As it happened, the wizard was merely crossing a street and this man was doing the same. He noticed the oncoming car first and whisked them both out of harms way. It was a simple act, more instinct than kindness, but the wizard was grateful and he granted the this man a unique wish. He could give him any one power, to be used over and over until his death. It would be a unique gift and one he must decide for himself.

As it happened this man was broken-hearted at the time of his heroic act. His girlfriend of many years has left him only weeks before. He was haunted by his love for her, particularly by a memory that came each time he glanced at a photo on the fridge door. She stood on the beach, backlit, her hair a silver outline against the grey of sky and ocean. It had been a sunny day, but the picture was not a good one. Still, it brought back his happiest memory, and that was something that broke him every time. He had torn up the photo, but later taped it back together. He couldn’t let it go, but the pain just didn’t seem to let up.

So when the wizard asked him what his power would be, the man said he wanted to be able to take away a person’s happiest memory. He would use it on himself and once he did the photo would be all but meaningless. It would find its way into the waste basket.

At first the wizard pulled his beard and seemed to hesitate, perhaps mulling over the cosmic ramifications of rendering such a trick. But then his cell phone rang and, reaching into his flowing robes, he took a call. It was his mother and he seemed peeved to get it.

“This really isn’t a good time,” he said.

The wizard shook his head at the man, his expression seeming to say, “Moms. Am I right?” At last, he held out a hand and placed it on the man’s forehead. His lips moved in a silent incantation.

“There,” he said aloud.

Then into the phone, “Not you, Ma. Some guy.”

The wizard walked away, but turned back, flattening the phone against his chest. “It is done,” he said. “You need only say, ‘Happiest memory you are gone.’ Use it wisely.”

When the man got back to his apartment, he took one long look at the photo. It had been in Malibu and the memory was a short one, though it represented a broader swath of his life. When he and Diana were first falling in love. He had looked into the sun too long, so that when his eyes tilted on her, there were spots of blackness floating around her face, and a dimness that shrouded her eyes in secrecy. But her smile came through his small blindness, a flash of gorgeous lips and bright teeth. He then felt her hand slip into his and heard her voice, husky and sweet and golden, “Ready to head back?” That moment encapsulated everything good about one fantastic year. His hand rose involuntarily and rested on the corners of the photo, flattening out the curling paper.

Taking a deep breath, the man closed his eyes.

“Happiest memory, you are gone.”

He let his mind go blank, breathing the way he did when he did yoga, sure that the magic worked best when you gave it a little space. Then he opened his eyes and looked at the picture. But the memory was still there, sharp as ever, bitter and sweet and agonizing.

“Damn.”

He tried it once more. Then again.

When he was drunk later that night he tried it so many times that he fell asleep on the kitchen floor in front of the refrigerator. Each time he said, “Happiest memory you are gone.”

In the morning he could still remember everything about that moment. The cry of the seagulls. The smell of her shampoo and sunblock. He decided that there really was no such thing as wizards. The wizard had just been some dude stumbling toward Comic Con or a meeting of D & D players. Or a lunatic with a strong grasp of wardrobe.

He laughed at himself until his head hurt.

There was no such thing as magic and he had no super powers.

Then in the Spring a small blue flower budded in the mulch at the corner of his yard. He spotted it one morning on the way to the coffee shop and he paused, a smile opening on his mouth, and he had a strong sense that whenever this blue flower bloomed, he felt happy. Because.

Then he realized that the only thing he knew for sure about the blue flower was that for a long time it had been a thing that meant something. Now he couldn’t remember what it was. He asked his sister if it meant anything to her.

“Mom planted those for us. Some in each of our yards. Cassie has some, too. Mine never made it. The year she was dying. You remember.”

And when she said it, he realized that part he could recall. And helping her plant the flowers wasn’t a happy memory really. He’d been irritated with her about it. Thinking it was sentimental. He might not always live here. One day he might not even want a yard. She’d blown off his grousing the way she always did.

“Let me do this,” she said.

It wasn’t the planting day that he couldn’t remember. It was something else. Of course, he was a kind of forgetful man. He often walked into a room and paused because his reason for coming was already out of his mind. Still, that blue flower hit him when he looked at it. It was sharp, but vacant. There had been a memory there and a meaning. It just wasn’t there anymore.

He began to wonder if he did have the super power. Had this forgotten thing been a happier memory than the day on the beach with Diana? He’d been sure that was his most joyous recollection, but he had been in the throes of his grief then and perhaps he’d not been seeing things clearly.

Then in the autumn he was cleaning out the grate when another missing memory made itself known to him. It was a damp day outside and on those days the chimney really smelled of wood smoke the most. As he leaned in to clean out the ashes, the smell caught him off guard. And he felt a smile forming on his lips – just like with the little blue flower – and then it was just a feeling like being empty. But if emptiness could itch. Because he knew that this smell of woodsmoke always made him think of something else that was sensory, like another fragrance or a taste, which was in turn connected to a person and a moment.

He was stunned by the loss.

Leaning back from the grate, he stared into the shadows of the room, but there was nothing there to answer the question. How many times had he used his power on himself that first night? How many happy memories had he erased?

Or was this more of his usual scattered mind?

He stayed late at his neighborhood bar, until only he and the bartender were left. Two feet of mahogany, waxed over the years to a mirror finish, separated them. Charlie had told him some good jokes; he knew a lot of them already. They had been talking for years.

If the wizard had been a wizard – and if he had a super power – tonight would have to show it. He couldn’t live anymore with the uncertainty. It had been terrorizing him, not knowing if he had magic or was simply on the precipice of Alzheimers. That’s what took his Mom. It ran in the family.

He looked into Charlie’s eyes a little too long. Men have codes about things like this. But he had to study him and see just how his eyes looked in the beginning. Charlie frowned at him.

“You okay?”

“Yes.” His voice sounded distant to himself.

He took a deep breath and then said to Charlie, “Happiest memory you are gone.”

Charlie straightened up, braced his hands on the bar. He turned his head to glance down the bar, his eyes probing the dimness of the room, looking for an answer.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think that’s me.”

“Of course it is,” the man said. His heart was racing, his hands trembling. “I just asked you too quick.”

“No,” Charlie said. But his brow was creased as he dropped his gaze to his feet. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t have no memory like that.”

When he glanced up at the man, his eyes glistened with tears. The man looked into his eyes, trying to find a missing light. Charlie turned away, taking the towel off his shoulder to wipe glasses.

“What was that thing you said a minute ago? The thing about the happy memory?”

“I don’t know.”

Charlie put a hand up on the shelf in front of him and leaned into his arm, resting his face against his sleeve. “I think you’d better get out of here.”

But the man had already slipped off his stool, his face white and his fingers numb and awkward as he shook a twenty out of his wallet.

“Night, Charlie.”

The bartender wouldn’t turn to face him. He didn’t say good night.

After that the man was sure his power was real. It awakened something in his personality. There had been a thrill that came when he took away Charlie’s happiest memory. It was undeniable. When he tried to think about the morality of it, his thoughts broke apart like a puzzle fresh out of the box. He couldn’t piece together a way to look at the mess of his new magic. He just knew it to be exhilarating.

My sister Bird is hard to understand. She has always been like someone I see through tall grass or peering back from pieces of a broken mirror. There are impressions, singular and distinct, without a strong sense of knowing.

Likely I am the same to her.

We are only two years apart in age. She is the older one. We were close only sometimes as children. Bird always wanted to get away, spending her free time with neighbor kids. I liked to find safe and quiet spaces on our farm, away from others, where I could drift in and out of fantasies inspired by the books I read.

She has not always had it easy. Or, more accurately, she is often in a maelstrom towards which she guided herself with many guileless little choices. That isn’t the same as doing it the hard way. She finds the will and strength to kick out, to break from the whirlpool, looking for land, safe and solid and dry.

Her husbands have each been like this; some have seemed like the harbor only to become the swap. Others have always been sinkholes, although she skirted round them, making the most of it, never quite staring it in the face long enough to draw a breath and decide to leave.

Eventually she ends it. Three husbands, a life in three acts.

Now the third one she has just left, so newly she probably still finds his hair or scent in the laundry. At the same time, she is staring down her second run in with cancer. I want to say, ‘Be strong.’ Yet this seems presumptuous. How do I know this person of fragments, this woman glimpsed through wild grass, unknowable to me for so many years, isn’t already fully sure she is strong enough?

I think she is.

I pray for her. Prayer has been a hard thing to define for a man who no longer believes in a sentient father god. It has been a discovery to think of prayer as a wish extended into the void of the universe.

In some ways I see this void as my eyes see it. It is black, yet sparkles with light. It is deep and merciless and wild. Still, I see it as my heart sees it, too. It is where all energy begins and ends, some anchored here on this rock, some gathered to brood on the moon and vibrate on the sun. In this mass of energy there is the makeup of what we call love. Hope. Kindness.

It isn’t necessary to know every mystery. Neither of the universe or of your own flesh and blood. But quietly you can close your eyes, let your heart peer out through the stars, and send up a fervent wish.

I hope the universe helps to knit your body, woman of the whirlpool and wild grasses, sister for this life. Keep kicking out, pulling yourself to safe harbor.

With slender fingers the fog first choked the trees before encircling the building. It was the kind of grey morning that gave no hint at the movements of the sun, that suggested that time was suspended, shadows given pause and highlights wiped away like fingerprints. The fog was a mercy, Dr. Klinger had said the previous evening, eying satellite feeds with a fevered intensity.

Max could see only the tops of pines distantly from the window of his cell. Below him, in the courtyard outside the back entrance to the compound, voices barked and metal cried as the persons from the lab hastily loaded equipment into vans that purred and fumed. It was an impromptu moving day that had sent everyone left in Dr. Klinger’s small operation into twenty four hours of perpetual motion. More than half of the original group had been mown down in the flight from the old campus.

“This time the watch worked,” the doctor said. “This time we didn’t put faith in AI only to discover how easily they could corrupt it. This time we went back to the beginning. To all beginnings. We rely on human wisdom and loyalty. The animal in us all can save us all.”

When Klinger started to rave, Max would go still, studying anything he could latch his gaze upon. He would take even breaths and remind himself that if he gored the doctor with his antlers, he would lose the only person in the group that had something like love for him. He had overheard the others speaking before their last flight from the hired guns of the corporation. He knew that some of them wanted to either give him up or incinerate him themselves. The idea was to hide all proof of the experiment. He was a liability.

When he told Dr. Klinger this, he was given assurances.

“I know who you heard saying those things. I always knew they weren’t loyal, Max. And did any of them make it out alive?”

“So am I supposed to relax and believe that karma will take care of everything? If karma were handling this-”

“You can’t believe that a man of science is concerned with karma.”

“If karma were really handling this, I’d like to know what the fuck I ever did to deserve being mutilated? Turned into a freak?”

The doctor struck him then, a quick, catlike blow with the flat of his hand against Max’s cheek. His eyes were bright with feeling.

“You are not a freak. You are an entire ecosystem. A miracle. The intelligent material of dozens of forms of life, each rewired to cooperate within your body, helping to circumnavigate all of the safeguards that evolution put into place to prevent science from stitching together new life. You are a marvel of biological engineering.”

Max had turned away. This was weeks ago and the first time he had ever felt the urge to kill. It had never been in his disposition to respond to a blow with a blow. His instinct had always been flight. It had made his father think of him as weak, peering at him with hazel eyes that were aloof with disgust. Or perhaps simply he was confused by Max.

The day that Klinger struck him, a different response emerged, like a chain buried in the mud that was suddenly pulled from both ends, so that it rose up with a metallic whine. That was when he knew that the doctor’s talk of an ecosystem was not limited to what he could see in himself when he looked in the mirror. Something was rewriting itself in Max. He was still apt to take flight, but now equally inclined to draw blood.

The doctor had turned away then, knotting his fingers together, his shoulders curving inward toward his chest. “Anyway, the betrayers weren’t taken down by accident. I scheduled the departures to make them most likely to be in the line of fire. Karma is a blind justice that primitives believe in. Any definitive retribution must be thoughtfully orchestrated.”

He turned back to Max then and he could not see the change in him. He must have still imagined him to be a man who cowered in the face of pain, because he placed a hand on his shoulder gently.

“I will always protect you, Max. You mean more to me than you will ever know.”

It was funny to think that this man was saying to him something that would inspire hope and peace were it to come from a parent or a lover. Issuing from the lips of this man, with his ignored beard and exhausted squint, it felt like a life sentence.

They could not both live, Max thought. One of them had to die.

Klinger studied him closely then.

“If you ever ventured out into the world, they would likely see you as you see yourself. You might be taken into another lab, taken apart, and studied organism by organism. And they’d make sure every trace of you was gone. What muriatic acid couldn’t sluice away would be pulled out of servers on line and taken from yellowing old folders.”

Max didn’t want to listen to Klinger, but he found himself mesmerized.

“Or else they’d shoot you where you stood, aiming for the head. They might bury you and say prayers that you’d never rise again. You would become a legend, something hill folk pass down to keep their children from wandering into the forest.”

This time when they abandoned their compound, Max studied the order in which the teams climbed into the vans. The hired guns were nowhere near them yet, according to the last communication with their watch, yet he wondered if Klinger were still hedging his bets, putting his weakest links in harm’s way in some bid to feel that blood was not quite on his own hands.

Max was put into a vehicle with Klinger and two women he knew as Natasha and Inez. He knew they were doctors, but they never wore name tags, and everyone at the institution called each other by their first names except for Klinger. Natasha was tall with angular features and long, beautiful hands. Her gaze was always quick and inscrutable. Inez was short and compact, wore her hair in a braid that coiled like a snake at the back of her head. She cracked her knuckles nervously whenever she listened to a briefing from Klinger, but sometimes Max thought she was looking at him with empathy when he happened upon her gaze.

The four of them were in back of the van, with another woman and a man in the front seats. They didn’t use horns to signal and they didn’t use communication devises. All phones had been turned off after the last contact with the watch, because once the lab was loaded and ready to go, the last thing to disconnect and load was the scrambling device they had used to prevent detection for the last two months. If anyone so much as took a selfie, they might in some way open themselves up to another ambush. The GPS systems in their vehicles had been ripped out and left at the site.

Their departure had been planned from the beginning. In the absence of any modern technology to assist them, they were getting out with old school methods. Careworn paper travel atlases had been procured and – unless the roads had been changed significantly since the turn of the century – they would get them to their next temporary compound. Their movements were synchronized with old fashioned timepieces. A small alarm bleeped one Klinger’s wrist watch and like magic the van in front began to roll forward into the fog.

The shadows creep deeply along the ruts in the road and swallow the trees up whole as night falls. We stand beside my car, Harry and me, shivering, wishing it was really spring.

My mom says the mountains are hazing; that’s what she calls it when the buds on the trees make the forest on the ridge look purple. When the magnolia in the neighbor’s yard started to bloom last weekend, Dad said the world really had gone to shit. There would be a late frost and kill everything.

“Everything’s upside down these days,” he said. He hunched over his computer, tuning the rest of us out. His style.

Maybe tonight it will frost. It’s cold enough or feels like it anyway.

Harry says, “You sure this is the place?”

He’s trembling and I put an arm around him. “This is where I saw him last time.”

We just have to wait.

Harry is patient and kind. He would follow a friend anywhere rather than let them go in alone. Luckily this doesn’t seem too dangerous. I’d never want to see Harry hurt. We’ve been friends since grade school. He helped me skip school when I had my first period so no one would see the blood on my jeans. My mom and dad were out of town on business and I didn’t want to tell my teacher or the secretaries in the principal’s office. They’re all terrible. Harry never said anything about it afterward to me or anyone else. He is good like no one I know.

The wind picks up on the mountainside, rustling the leaves on the ground, bringing a whiff of warm earth and new life. There are soft disruptions in the shadows, nothing too loud, just squirrels scrambling around. A few cries from birds. My mom would probably know their names.

“That’s a tufted titmouse,” she might say. “You can tell by the liquid notes.”

She was a nerd before it was cool, she likes to say. I always pretend it’s a good joke because I feel sorry for her. Humor is not her strength.

Then on the ridge above us, silhouetted against the indigo twilight, I see the stag man as clearly as I did the last time. Tonight I’m not high, though; I made sure we’re clean and sober. My mouth goes dry, but I give Harry’s arm a squeeze. I want him to look but not to say anything. His hair brushes my cheek as he tilts his head to study the ridge. I feel him stiffen against me.

So I am not crazy.

The stag man isn’t tall, but his antlers make him seem like a beautiful dancer out of a strange ballet. His legs taper down to a pair of hooves. It makes him stand unnaturally, his butt stuck out a little more than normal, his shoulders thrown back, too. It really is kind of like a dancer or this kid in school who everyone was calling gay a year before he came out. Danny. He always walked like that. It made some of the other guys look when they caught him out of the corner of their eye, then scowl and turn away, like they were tricked into it. I know I saw that happen at least three times and it made me laugh every time.

But this isn’t Danny and I’m not laughing.

“I can’t believe it,” Harry whispers.

“Are you scared?”

“No. I don’t think so. Are you?”

“No.”

I’m not scared. I wasn’t scared the first time, either. He doesn’t seem threatening. He just looks sad, his head turning now and again to study the woods. Now his head tilts toward us and while I’m not scared, I still find my stomach turning to jelly under his gaze.

The stag man turns his whole body toward us now, his hooves scratching the moist spring earth, one of them rasping along a vein of stone so we can hear the sound of it. Now his face is in shadow, his antlers and his lean, square shoulders trimmed in dim silver light. If he approaches us, he will remain faceless until he is right on top of us, but out cheeks and brows, our noses and chins will carry those dim silver highlights. He’ll read us and see inside us maybe a little, the way no one else in ours lives ever can. I don’t know why I think this. I’m just tired of trying to make myself clear to older people who always turn my words and my thoughts upside down.

It doesn’t make any sense that I think he’ll understand, but it makes no sense that he even exists either. Harry and I link hands like we always have when we’re about to be swallowed up by mystery. With his nails biting into my palm, our breath curls up around our faces, and we wait without breathing as the stag man closes the distance.

When I was ten I threw a dinner party for my grandmother and my aunt. I had been given a cookbook for kids by my mother that year. It nurtured my desire to conquer grownup rituals like making food other than peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or grilled cheese.

My grandmother was rather old by then and little did we know she was in a golden moment just before a series of small strokes would shroud her mind in confusion and weaken her body. At the time she was still rosy cheeked, with a shock of white hair rising up off her brow and a whimsical wave over each ear. She wore a double knit pantsuit when she was going anywhere nice; at home she wore printed cotton dresses under a faded apron. I was pleased to see the pantsuit was trotted out for my humble fete.

My aunt was rather like my grandmother, only younger and more vivid, with dark hair that was just as unruly and only a little peppered with grey. She wore lipstick always, although no other makeup. She was the oldest girl in the family but she might have been the same age as any of her sisters. We always thought that having no children had preserved her looks. Her name was Becky.

Becky had a lot of distinct peculiarities, among them rocking on her heels while she listened to you; grabbing a niece or nephew as they walked by to check that their ears were clean; and in later years blinking her eyes quite a lot while she spoke. Someone said that was nerves.

For my dinner party, I insisted on doing all the cooking. I chose a recipe in which you made a meatloaf, frosted it with mashed potatoes, and put it back in the oven with slices of American cheese laid in overlapping diagonals along the top. I thought it was the height of elegance. I probably heated up a can of green beans as a side dish.

I remember folding our printed paper napkins into triangles and laying them out alongside our Corelle plates with the little green flowers all around the edges. They were corny plates, but hard to break.

Everyone said dinner was great, but there was an air to the whole evening that I’ve never been able to put my finger on. It was as if Grandma and Becky had been placed in unchartered territory. It wasn’t that they didn’t know my mother’s dishes quite well and there was nothing extraordinary about a meat and potatoes meal in our family. It was more to do with who had orchestrated this event. None of my uncles or boy cousins cooked, but I was quite used to my father’s delicious Saturday morning breakfasts.

I think I would say that Becky was taking in the whole thing with a mixture of confusion and amusement. It was plain to them that I was not like the other boys in the family, but what exactly this dinner party meant was something that her personal life experiences could not quite reconcile. We were family, and that went a long way to keeping the evening humming pleasantly. Not that our family specialized in uneventful gatherings; our default was typically at least two people leaving in a huff. Yet still there was that elusive quality of unspoken surmising: a soft kind of astonishment and many things unsaid.

After dinner I read aloud to my aunt and my grandmother from a book of Tennyson’s poetry I had recently discovered. I think my grandmother nodded off early on, not that she didn’t love the written word. It was something that was key to her life. Still, she was fading as the long summer twilight burnished the sky outside our picture window.

I stood before the glass and read from The Lady of Shallot with as much artistic lilt as possible. I enunciated every word with something that tried to be a British accent – but gently, as not to earn the kind of criticism that any act of pretentiousness was rightly apt to receive in my family. It was a coup to even read a whole classical poem without eliciting sniggers from one of my relations, and there was a moment when my mother had a coughing fit that might very well have been a smothered laugh. At least it sounded a lot like the way she stifled nervous giggles in church.

I had not yet discovered who I would become at that age, although the difference between who I felt like and what other people expected me to be had begun to cause me a lot of confusion. Yet on this night, despite that underlying sense of a secret not quite articulated, I was still a child in my family, with the women near me providing a sense of safety. It surprises me to discover as I write this, that this would be the first of many coming out parties, each nudging me forward toward my authentic self.

That night I watched the taillights of Becky’s dusty little Pinto fade down the drive, still drunk from the thrill of what I had accomplished. The words of Tennyson expanded in my mind like a spider web growing bigger in the brewing heat of a summer day. The crickets in the meadow outside the house were noisy; it was only about eight o’clock and there was plenty of time yet to clean up my dishes and wind down with a little television before going to bed with a book. The night and I were still young.

It was hard for Max to walk at first. He was sure his ankles would snap under his weight. But that bastard Dr. Klinger said he would be fine and needed to exercise. The doctor would protest being called names.

“I saved your life, young man,” he might say. His woolly eyebrows would escape up under his bushy grey hair, that tangle that spilled forward each time he raked it back.

What would Max say in return? He might say that his life wasn’t saved, that he could have lived perfectly well as an amputee. They could have outfitted him with those blades like the Olympian who smashed through his bathroom door and killed his wife. He would rather have metal arcs spanning the distance between his knees and the ground.

“But you had to be shown. The board had to finally see my vision, that bunch of number-crunching neanderthals. The accident happening on your way from my lab was providential, as my grandmother used to say. It was serendipitous. You coming out unscathed except for the hamburger meat that was your old feet. Meanwhile the deer beaten to a pulp but those feet as perfect as they ever were.”

The doctor might put a hand to his chest piously. “If anything I should be thanked.”

Max had thought a lot about his trip to the doctor in the last three weeks. His employer had sent him out to announce formally that they were cutting funding to the doctor’s program. There had been too many liberalities taken with his study of interspecies genetic co-modification. When the doctor sent them a white mouse with the red wings of a Cardinal at Christmas, the board was deeply disturbed, if briefly entertained, watching the creature fly up and down the length of the boardroom table, snatching up bits of cheese off the lunch platter while hovering inches above the surface.

“But what would the press say if they saw this…thing?” the CEO asked.

There was a brief conversation, voices rising in anger at times, before they all fell silent to hear the chair speak.

“It will have to be incinerated.”

So it was done. For good measure, they collected everyone’s cell phones and scanned them to make sure no one had taken a video. Each person in the room signed a nondisclosure again, although from the beginning of the project, they had already signed dozens of amended and updated versions of the same.

Somehow it fell to Max to break the news to the doctor. It felt wrong from the beginning. He was the youngest member of the board and some would say his greatest qualification was being a blood relation to the CEO. It was a fool’s errand, to say the least.

The doctor had wept when he received the news. But then he had pulled himself together, offered Max a lunch, as the journey from the remote lab to the nearest town was some distance, and the long roads twisting and still etched with winter ice. All he remembered about the drive back to town were high banks of white snow on either side. Then the stag, standing there in the middle. If he hadn’t felt so tired after lunch, if it hadn’t been so hard to keep his eyes open. In the weeks he spent lying in bed, he had plenty of time to catalog his regrets.

He should have headed back before lunch, when he was still buzzing from the thermos of coffee that kept him company on the ride in.

He should have refused the task; his uncle would hardly fire him for it.

He should have stayed in college and finished his MBA instead of being seduced by an offer for an immediate and easy windfall.

He should have studied dance, as he wanted to when he was sixteen, instead of being shamed out of it by his father.

He should have died in that boating accident at five instead of his cousin Katie. It always came to this; it was an illogical regret. He had had many joyful moments in life between that summer day when the water off the Cape turned maroon all around them and the morning he woke up to find he had hooves instead of feet. All the same, he couldn’t escape the thought that this was a long overdue payment for a debt he owed the universe. Somehow he had cheated that day, getting to walk away unscathed.

On the fortieth day after the car accident, the doctor insisted he walk. It was hard to do because the small area of his new feet allowed him little wiggle room for balance. He found he wanted to spill forward.

“Well, that’s enough for today,” Dr. Klinger said. “The tenons are still knitting and I’d hate to see you snap them in a fall. I could kill the pain with morphine for your sake, but seeing my handiwork undone would be most unpleasant.”

As Max began to fall asleep, the doctor stroked his brow fondly.

“You really are a miracle. You’re the most beautiful creature ever designed by man. You just don’t see it yet.”

“I’ll never be able to balance on these deer feet,” Max said drowsily. The physical therapy was exhausting. Or else they were feeding him something in his IV to lower the veil. His eyes fluttered closed and he forgot as soon as he saw it that one of the doctor’s assistants was wheeling in a cart on which were perched a strangely familiar set of antlers. Eight points. Then Max could not open his eyes any longer.

“I think I know how to solve the problem of balance,” he heard the doctor say.